


The Sound of Our Heart

by OpienYourMind



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Humor, References to Depression, Spoilers up to beginning of Chapter 8, Suicidal Thoughts, just a guy and his sword girlfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 09:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13761096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpienYourMind/pseuds/OpienYourMind
Summary: Ever since waking up in Morytha, Mythra has been feeling conflicted. When the opportunity presents itself, she decides to be frank with Rex, and maybe she can make up for the past.





	The Sound of Our Heart

Rex sighed and slumped against the wall of the derelict building. The group had seen a sign half-worn away by wind and time upon entering that read “parking garage,” not that anyone knew what that meant.  Neither Mórag nor Zeke had ever come across the term in their studies, leaving them to assume that it could only be another forgotten piece of the old human society. Morytha and its structures were more alien than any barren seascape Rex had ever seen on a dive, and he breathed a sigh of thanks that he had his friends and his sanity. 

After clearing out a couple of robotic sentries from the basement, they had settled on the building as a decent place to rest for the night- or what passed for night in the perpetually dim and eerie ruins. Rex had volunteered first shift on watch, so now he sat at an opening in the wall, staring out into the gray land and sky through the embers of Brighid’s small fire.

“Mind if I join you?” came a quiet voice from a few feet away.

Rex looked up, seeing Mythra walking towards him in the dim light. “Be my guest,” he replied, patting the floor next to him. Even if it wasn’t someone more talkative, he was glad to have company. His brain wandered to the thought of sharing a shift with Zeke or a Blade as talkative as Nim or Pandoria, and he corrected himself- he was grateful  _ especially _ to have a more introverted companion.

“Thanks,” she murmured, taking a seat at his side and immediately leaning into his shoulder. Rex tensed at the unexpected touch, blood rushing to his face.

“Uhh, Mythra? You feeling all right?” Rex did his best to keep his voice even. He would’ve expected something like this from Pyra, who normally let her warmer side show, but he would’ve laughed at anyone who expected the blond Aegis to initiate contact.

“...” Mythra didn’t respond, but simply nodded. It could just as easily have been a trick of the light, but Rex could’ve sworn he saw her cheeks flush slightly red too. “I’ve been… thinking, I guess.”

“About what?” Now genuinely confused, he turned his head and looked into her golden eyes.

“I don’t know. The connection between Driver and Blade.  _ Our _ connection. My memories. What you said to us on the cliffs. The time I spent sealed.”

“Well, that clears things right up. Do you, uh, want to talk about it?” 

“Yeah. Thanks.” Mythra sat back from him a little bit, which was disappointing (though he wasn’t going to voice it), and took a deep breath.

“I want to apologize, Rex.”

“What? For what? I already told you, I’m gonna take on everything you’ve been carrying. I want to be your real Driver, and I won’t let anything stand in the way of that.”

“For acting so cold to you. Pyra was right… I thought that if we got closer to you, it’d just make it harder to ask Father to kill us, but look how things turned out. Maybe if I’d opened up to you more, told you what we were feeling, Jin and Malos wouldn’t have been able to get to us in the first place.”

“Hey, don’t say that!” Rex interjected, scooting closer to her. “Even if I’d known about everything, I couldn’t have protected you. It’s my fault. I was selfish, and I didn’t respect the path you wanted to take.” He leaned in and put an arm around her shoulder. Mythra flinched slightly, but didn’t protest and slowly slumped into him.

He expected her to blame herself, but she stayed quiet, breathing slowly. She closed her eyes and sighed quietly. 

“Are you kidding me?”

“Huh?”

“You were selfish as often as Mórag laughs. You saved me and Pyra, and you said you didn’t care if our power kept hurting you. Rex, don’t you realize we owe you everything?”

“Come on, Mythra!” Rex spoke, raising his voice a little more than he had intended. “Pyra shared her life with me, and you two have been helping me reach my goal all this time. It’s me who owes you everything!”

“Pfft…”

“Eh? What are you laughing for?”

“Aah-ha-ha! Hee-hee-hee-hee… I’m sorry, it’s- Ha!” Mythra burst out into uninhibited laughter, a series of unladylike snorts and giggles Rex never would’ve expected in a million years flowing out of her. It was so infectious, and so rare to see the Aegis even smiling, that he couldn’t help but start grinning back at her.

“Architect, we’re both idiots…” Mythra grinned, as she finally stopped chuckling. “Let’s just call it even, okay? I hate being indebted to people anyway.”

“Fine by me,” Rex agreed. “Salvager’s Code, Rule Six-”

“Nope.”

“Killjoy.”

Mythra snickered and rested her head against his collarbone. The two stayed there in a comfortable silence for a while, listening to each other’s soft breathing and the low crackling of the flames.

“I can hear your heartbeat, Rex.”

“Yeah, your head’s right next to my heart,” he replied. He was confused why she’d mention something like that out of the blue.

“No, I mean… I still hear it when I move away. I hear it everywhere. I heard it when Malos was holding us at the cliffs. Even before I woke up, Pyra could hear it. Don’t you hear mine?” She was whispering by this point, not moving her head but looking up into his eyes.

“I…” Rex hesitated. He’d never paid any mind to it, but sometimes he felt like, at the edge of his hearing, there was a second pulse in his ears. 

“Touch my core,” she murmured, raising her open palm and letting a blue cord of ether trail from it into his chest. “The sensation might be a little much, so keep your focus on our affinity.”

“Right.” Rex extended his index and middle finger toward Mythra’s sectioned Core Crystal, keeping the blue line locked firmly in his mind.

His fingers brushed the green crystal, and a pulse reverberated from it through his entire body. A roaring swelled in his ears. As the pulse repeated and grew louder, he began to pick out individual sounds from it.

Battle cries. Shouts of anger. Pained screams. Quiet sobbing. Wind fanning fire. And in and out of his hearing, a faint but familiar sound. What was that? Rex concentrated as hard as he could on the line connecting him to Mythra and forged deeper into the jumble of noise, trying to isolate the snatches of the sound he’d heard. He seized on one, and saw in his mind a small, candle-like flame on a fingertip. Voices came, slowly, collecting into a familiar memory.

_ That night in Gormott, after escaping the Titan ship. We had convinced Nia to stay with us. We were all around Pyra’s campfire. _

The voices coalesced into a bubbling laugh. That was what he’d heard.

He suddenly felt a tug in his chest, and was yanked back to the present with a gasp. Mythra was staring into his eyes concernedly, her fingers still trailing blue and gold wisps of ether.

“Are-” Rex swallowed. He was having trouble finding his voice, and there was an odd catch in his throat. “Are those…?”

“Your memories.”

“How--why…”

“When you doubled over that time on the cliffs, it was at the same time as Malos stole our memories and power. Until you came with the third sword, we were just an empty vessel. It was almost as if we’d returned to our core… but I think somehow our data stored itself away in your half. Now that we’re back, we remember everything, but it’s not the same--rather than you living thanks to our life force, I think it’s as if we’re both drawing from one another.”

“So that’s why your heart sounded like that,” he mused. “Before, did it still-”

“No. Do you remember when you first met Pyra, in our memory of Elysium? What did you hear then?”

Rex reached into the depths of his mind. “Bells. Like at the Indoline Sanctuary.” His eyes widened. “Wait, are you saying-”

“Pyra and I think the bell was the sound of our heart. When we woke up there, after you came to us, it had stopped.”

_ It’s such a mournful sound… It hasn’t stopped, not in all these years. _

“I wish I could’ve helped you sooner,” Rex mumbled, recalling what they had told him during the battle with Jin and Malos. 

“The thing is, you did. You saved us when we needed it the most.” She pushed off his shoulder and sat on her knees facing him. “I never once thought we needed saving. Not when I was fighting alongside Addam, not while we were sealed, not once after you woke us up.”

He swallowed. “Were you… dreaming of Elysium, the entire time you were sealed?”

“Sometimes, I’d be reliving memories. Sometimes I’d be lucid. But I always came back, and I hated that I could still hear the bells. But…“ She cracked a faint smile. “I don’t mind hearing this. Although hearing you freak out at Nia about whatever you just picked up could get old soon.”

“Disrespecting your Driver again, are we?”

The two of them shared a laugh. When Mórag came to take over the watch, she found them with half-closed eyes, Mythra with her head on Rex’s shoulder and Rex with his head on Mythra’s. After enduring a brief scolding for slacking off from the Special Inquisitor, they returned to the fire by the rest of their friends. Rex sat down a few feet away from the embers, next to Poppi, who was currently using Tora for a pillow. After a few minutes, Mythra scooted in next to him.

“I want to… listen for a little while longer,” she whispered, staring downward with a dusting of red on her face, although the shyness was quickly superseded by her familiar sharp edges. “But if you start staring, I will punch you, shared pain or no shared pain.”

Rex gave her an only slightly malicious grin. “Sure, budge up. Salvager’s honor.”

Mythra scowled, but leaned into his chest nonetheless. Soon she was breathing slowly, her hair fluttering in and out of her closed eyes with each exhale. Rex laid a finger gently on his X-shaped core and let the noise of the flames and the softly reverberating laughter lull him to sleep, fully relaxed for the first time since Indol, and his Blade for the first time since before Torna fell into the clouds.

**Author's Note:**

> Sure is fun to type in character and ship names for tags and not get suggestions. Anyway, I decided to write something for one of the many ships I'll go down with- still hoping AO3 one day gets this game more recognition. Side note- I've had musicals on the brain lately, so this was partially inspired by a scene from Spring Awakening.


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